1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a technology for rendering a character to be displayed or printed.
2. Related Art
To render a character to be displayed or printed on a paper, font data representing the shape of the characters is required. Font data has one of three formats; namely, a bitmap format, an outline format, and a stroke format. In a process of rendering a character using outline font data, three steps are necessary; namely, steps of “Outline Drawing” in which the outline of a character is drawn, “Filling” in which an area inside the outline is filled, and “Transferring” in which bit-mapped data of the drawn character is transferred to a display device or a printer. The three steps can be performed in parallel with each other, according to a certain method.
For the steps of rendering a character using outline font data to be carried out, a memory for temporarily storing data for processing is required. If the data size of a character to be rendered is greater than the capacity of a memory, the character is divided into plural partial areas, and drawn area by area, according to a certain method. In connection with the method, a method of determining whether a character should be rendered in plural areas on the basis of the font size of the character is proposed in JP-A-9-230844.
It is desirable that rendering of a character be performed as speedily as possible. In view of this, the present invention provides a technique of rendering a character at a high speed, regardless of the capacity of a memory in use.